Armature core winding machines have a pair of complementary wire guiding shrouds between which the core of the unwound armature core assembly is gripped. The shrouds guide the wire into the slots during the winding operation. Heretofore, the wire drawn from a source thereof was wound into the core slots with moving arms known as flyers that rotated about an axis perpendicularly intersecting the axis of the core. Usually there were two flyers, one at each side of the core, with the orbits of the flyers so oriented that the stretches of wire leading from the flyers to the armature core slid along the surfaces of the shrouds and into a pair of slots in position to receive wire. The flyers are mounted on opposing shafts that are driven in opposite directions during the winding operation. The drive shafts and structures used to rotate the shafts limit access to the winding areas to assist hooking the lead wires onto commutator hooks, guide wires into armature slots and like operations. In these prior winding machines, the intersecting axes of the core and flyers were horizontal so that during the winding operation, the armature core assemblies were held with their axes horizontal. Examples of this type of winding machine are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,474,515 and No. 3,818,570.
While the aforesaid conventional armature winding machines were a boon to the electric motor industry, they have not been able to meet the ever increasing demands for higher production speeds. To a large degree, that was due to the inevitable complexity of the mechanism required to drive the flyers of conventional armature winding machines. Bearing in mind that the flyers rotated in circular orbits that encompassed the wire guiding shrouds, they were mounted on the adjacent ends of coaxial but spaced apart relatively heavy shafts and, as a result, the rotating flyer assemblies had considerable inertia. This limited the rapidity with which the flyers could be started and stopped and thus made it impossible to significantly increase production speeds, since to gain the desired speed, the mechanism by which the flyers were driven would have to have been capable of instantaneous starts and stops and immediate acceleration to a very high running speed.
But the size and weight of the shafts that carried the flyers was not the only speed limiting factor. The pulleys, belts and gear box needed to bring driving torque, in opposite directions, to the flyer shafts also contributed significantly to the reasons why the production speeds of conventional armature winding machines were limited. In addition to the speed limiting characteristics of the flyer assemblies of prior winding machines, and their driving mechanism, these parts of the machine were also rather costly to produce.